New features cover auto-scaling of the VM and rolling upgrades – the ability to move to new versions of OpenStack without downtime.

“We continue to make our work on OpenStack production grade – with features for scale-out, auto management, and we are also working on reducing the administration cost,” HPE’s vice president for hybrid IT, Xavier Poisson, told The Reg.

Integration with more third parties out of the box is another big issue, according to Poisson: “We need to drop the cost on the administrative side now OpenStack is becoming a real environment for production.”

Additions to HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 include certified support and lifecycle management of third-party network systems such as F5 Networks, load balancing, and SDN offerings such as VMware’s NSX-v and Midokura MidoNet. There is improved operations management, such as enhanced capacity reporting.

Also, HPE’s OpenStack bundle features new logging, auditing and monitoring capabilities for enhanced security; changes on the admin side that let you add and remove VMs without taking systems down; and native support for new accelerated network interface cards from Intel.

HPE reckons overall 4.0 is a more polished stack for those in service provisioning – telcos and also IT departments offering as a service something that was once delivered via proprietary kit.

Aside from the standard nod toward cloud migration, HPE also knows there’s opportunity there, too, for those returning from the public cloud – their beef being proprietary lock-in and cost.

HPE reckons on its numbers that a VM on OpenStack costs $0.12 per month versus $0.15 per month on AWS “at scale” – based on skills and manpower but minus data transfer. It’s a cost HPE thinks customers are now waking up to and acting on, because they have realized there is a choice open to them via OpenStack.

“Proximity to data” is also one of the top drivers of private cloud, HP said. ®